1,800-year-old Roman tombs in Bulgaria included medallion featuring an emperor and glass bottles for collecting mourners' tears
Two large graves discovered in northern Bulgaria likely tell "a sad family story" about wealthy Roman landowners whose child predeceased them in the third century A.D., archaeologists say. In December 2023, a farmer unexpectedly found the graves while plowing his field in the village of Nova Varbovka. Because this region was a Roman province called Moesia in antiquity, archaeologists from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History came to excavate the graves. Both graves were built of brick, with plaster lining the walls and a large slab of limestone covering them. The larger of the two was roughly 10 feet (3 meters) long and contained the remains of two adults — a man and a woman who were both around 45 to 60 years old at death — buried with jewelry, coins, and ceramic and glass vessels. The smaller grave, made somewhat earlier, contained the skeleton of a 2- to 3-year-old child and a rare bronze medallion depicting the Roman emperor Caracalla's (ruled A.D. 19